Easy Rawlins returns to solve a mystery set amid the flames of the hottest summer L.A. has ever seen.
Just after devastating riots tear through Los Angeles in 1965 - when anger is high and fear still smolders everywhere - the police turn up at Easy Rawlins's doorstep. He expects the worst, as usual. But they've come to ask for his help.
A man was wrenched from his car by a mob at the riots' peak and escaped into a nearby apartment building. Soon afterward, a redheaded woman known as Little Scarlet was found dead in that building - and the fleeing man is the obvious suspect. But the man has vanished.
The police fear that their presence in certain neighborhoods could spark a new inferno, so they ask Easy Rawlins to see what he can discover. The vanished man is the key, but he is only the beginning. Easy enlists the help of his longtime friend Mouse to break through the shroud. And what Easy finds is a killer whose rage, like that which burned in the city for weeks, is intrinsically woven around deep-set passions - feelings echoed within Easy himself.
Rawlins's hunt for the killer reveals a new city emerging from the ashes, with the promise of a new life for Easy, Mouse, and his old friends Jackson Blue and Jewelle.
It is a matter of legend that Walter Mosley's career took off one fine day in 1992 when Bill Clinton named him as one of his favorite novelists. Mosley fits squarely within the tradition of African American authors writing about race and blackness and has been compared to Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man). In an interview with the New York Times recently, Mosley said: "I have never met an African American who was surprised by the attack on the World Trade Center. Blacks do not see America as the great liberator of the world. Blacks understand how the rest of the world sees us, because we have also been the victims of American imperialism."
Given all that, one would expect a Mosley novel based in the Los Angeles suburb of Watts at the height of the devastating race riots of 1965 to amount to more than a simple murder investigation, and Little Scarlet does not disappoint. Although the story is narrated in the first person by Easy Rawlins, who is the hero of a series of Mosley novels, the true protagonist of the book is collectively the riots and their aftermath. Mosley is considerably more interested in the ambiguous state of mind of the black citizenry, the disorientation of the cops and the looted, shambolic condition of Watts itself than he is in the adventures of his hero. Watts, in truth, is a world turned upside down, and Mosley simply points his hero at it and rolls the camera.
The vehicle Mosley has chosen by way of plot is neatly ironic and perfectly mirrors the social inversion of the times: A black woman, Nola Payne (the Little Scarlet of the title -- she has red hair), has been brutally murdered. Fingers are pointed, inevitably, at a white man who was seen with her in Watts during her last hours. But in the high fever of boiling racial tension, the last thing the white cops need is a white perpetrator. On the other hand, failure to investigate would also be seen as highly provocative by the black community. Escalation must be avoided at all costs. Only a child of the streets, a black man with no direct affiliation to white authority, a humble 45-year-old with enough civic responsibility and integrity to be interested in keeping the uneasy peace that followed the riots -- a big, comfortable, family man blessed with quiet charm who can take care of himself in a punch-up and talk back to white cops who do not appreciate his mission and have a lot to hide when it comes to the identity of the true killer -- only Easy, in other words, can possibly save this day that rests on a knife edge. But our hero, with the help of the young and voluptuous Juanda, quickly establishes that the white man didn't do it. The more he digs, the more the evidence points to a quite different kind of villain. So where in L.A. is the culprit? How many black women has he killed already? Why did he kill them? Why haven't the cops investigated him in the past and -- above all -- what color is he? In the end, naturally, the perpetrator is identified thanks to Easy, who almost single-handedly defuses this social time bomb.
To flesh out his hero, Mosley endows him with imposing height, great physical strength, enormous skill in street pugilism and an occasional associate, the killer Raymond "Mouse" Alexander. ("Telling him no was was as dangerous a task as moving nitroglycerine in a truck with no shock absorbers." ) In evoking the atmosphere of Watts after the riots, Mosley is nothing less than masterly: "All he had left was the burnt and broken worktable surrounded by a couple hundred pairs of scorched shoes. Why would somebody want to burn shoes?"
Mosley is also fearless in exploring the underlying ambiguity of race: Negro National Guardsmen bully blacks in perfect imitation of their white colleagues; it is an out-of-town white cop, Detective Melvin Suggs, who bends the rules in order to send Easy off on his mission; some African Americans are so brainwashed by white elitism they will go to insane lengths to present themselves as Caucasian; poor whites without a racist bone in their bodies are left financially ruined by the riots.
The only quibble I have with Little Scarlet, which I enjoyed immensely, concerns the character of the hero. It is commonplace that the lone male who, in the guise of detective or other secret agent, goes about righting wrongs and fighting for the virtue and dignity of women, is a direct descendant of the Arthurian knight, and Easy is a product of this noble line. He never refuses a joust, he gets embroiled with at least one adversary so big, mean, muscular and bad that he can fairly be called a monster, his anger is always of the righteous kind within his chivalric code and he manages to resist the lascivious temptation presented by Juanda.
So far so good, but it is in the nature of narrative that great heroes must have great weaknesses if they are to avoid the genre of fairy tale. Philip Marlowe knew himself to be compromised by the Los Angeles of the '40s, drank heavily and lost as many fights as he won; Holmes loved cocaine; Bond was a relentless womanizer; Lancelot was a passionate adulterer and traitor to his king -- and Quixote was mad. Rawlins, by contrast, is pretty much flawless. Perhaps Mosley wants to show us that a black knight is even better than a white knight, which would explain why dear old Easy hardly misses an opportunity to spell out his virtues ("That's why she liked me, I stood up for myself but still didn't lord it over other people when I had the upper hand") and can come across as somewhat anachronistic in his political correctness.
Personally, I found myself wishing that our hero possessed more in the way of breadth and depth. As I understand it, Watts was part of a mighty revolution that changed America and perhaps the world. I would have liked Rawlins to experience more directly for us the sheer psychological rawness of that time, which Mosley prefers to elicit from third parties: the catharsis following the sudden release of centuries of pent-up rage, the thrill and fear of anarchy, the gnawing terror of the rough beast now unleashed, the squalor and shame of the looting of blacks by blacks, the pride of the African American community that was finally fighting back. Certainly, Easy has plenty of very reasonable, even anodyne, opinions about race and riots; not a lot of convincing gut reaction, however. He is just a tad too good to be true. That aside, Little Scarlet is a terrific yarn from a tormented moment in recent American history.
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Mosely introduced Easy Rawlins in 1990’s
Devil in a Blue Dress, and the unofficial PI has only become angrier, more intense, and definitely more complex since then. Here, he’s embroiled in L.A.’s racial politics, investigating a murder while asking himself some tough questions. Critics agree that
Little Scarlet is the best in the series. Mosely not only offers a dense portrait of bloody black-white relations, but also raises important questions about the “gray” areas that Easy must face. Characters—some new, some old—are introspective and richly drawn. Overall,
Little Scarlet is a masterpiece portrait of South Central L.A., “his most searing and unforgettable account of America to date” (
Los Angeles Times).
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
Set during the Watts riots of 1965, this eighth entry in Mosley's acclaimed Easy Rawlins series (
Bad Boy Brawly Brown, etc.) demonstrates the reach and power of the genre, combining a deeply involving mystery with vigorous characterizations and probing commentary about race relations in America. Easy Rawlins, 45, is—like the rest of black L.A.—angry: "the angry voice in my heart that urged me to go out and fight after all the hangings I had seen, after all of the times I had been called nigger and all of the doors that had been slammed in my face." But Easy stays out of the fiery streets until a white cop and his bosses recruit him to identify the murderer of a young black woman, Nola Payne; the cops suspect an unidentified white man whom Nola sheltered during the riots, and are worried that if
they pursue the case, word will leak and the riots will escalate. Easy, an unlicensed PI who also works as a school custodian, agrees to investigate, drawing into his quest several series regulars, including the stone killer Mouse, the magical healer Mama Jo and his own family. There's also a sexy young woman whose allure, like that of the violent streets, threatens to smash the life of integrity he has so carefully built. In time, Easy focuses on a homeless black man as the killer, not only of Nola but of perhaps 20 other black women, all of whom had hooked up with white men. This is Mosley's best novel to date: the plot is streamlined and the language simple yet strong, allowing the serpentine story line to support Easy's amazingly complex character and hypnotic narration as Mosley plunges us into his world and, by extension, the world of all blacks in white-run America. Fierce, provocative, expertly entertaining, this is genre writing at its finest.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
*Starred Review* Mosley returns to top form in this ninth installment of his celebrated Easy Rawlins series. In the early volumes, the calendar moved ahead almost one decade per book, but Mosley has been lingering through the 1960s--rightfully so, given the far-reaching impact of that turbulent era on African American life. Here it's the last days of the Watts riots in 1966, and a black woman, nicknamed Little Scarlet, has been found murdered in her apartment, the same building that an unidentified white man appeared to enter after escaping a mob of rioters. Did the white man commit the murder? The LAPD wants answers quickly, which is why Rawlins is asked to investigate. As has been the case throughout this series, the mystery at hand serves as a window opening on a historical moment. As Easy investigates, he finds himself forced to make sense of his own contrary feelings about the riots--his sadness at the loss of life and property in his community set against his recognition of inevitability, of the fact that the riots were expressing out in the open the anger every black man and woman had been forced to hide: "Now it's said and nothing will ever be the same. That's good for us, no matter what we lost. And it could be good for white people, too." Mosley remains a master at showing his readers slices of history from the inside, from a perspective that is all those things history usually isn't: intimate, individual, and passionate.
Bill OttCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
